Sleep Over Jack
Refugee
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2004
- Messages
- 2,089
Ok, they mention it's U2's best album since Achtung Baby in the contents page.
Right, lets see:
"ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! Bono began Boy, 24 years ago now, counting in the opening bars of "I Will Follow" just so. They sounded drilled and disciplined from the start, marshalling the righteous ire of The Clash with the rigour of Joy Division, like God's own post-punk band....
UNOS! DOS! TRES! CATORCE! So when "Vertigo" wails into life with mangled Spanish, it feels like a timely nod to their garage-band hinterland. "Catorce" rather than the expected "cuatro" because this is, after all, U2's 14th album (including Wide Awake In America and Passengers). It had, by by all accounts, a difficult gestation, a year's work with Chris Thomas, including with a 50-piece orchestra, was shelved. There are actually seven people, including Eno, Flood and Nelle Hooper, credited with "additional production". Having spent a decade reinventing themselves as stadium ironists, the supreme irony may be that sincerity is the trickiest pose of all to maintain. If ATYCLB saw them reapplying for the job of Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band In The World, four years on, they might still be on probation.
In which case recalling Steve Lillywhite, the producer of their debut trilogy of albums, to work with them seems like a back-to-basics statement of intent. But no-one steps into the same garage twice. While the songs on HTDAAB revisit the wide-eyed, claning vistas of October or War, some of that marching certainty has been lost, the compasses are reeling and all the clocks seem swry. Really, the cover of this record could have been an experienced update on the blankly innocent portrait of Boy. The title might simply have been Man.
In retrospect, the key line on ATYCLB was from that affectionate quarrel with Michael Hutchence, "Stuck In A Moment": "I'm not afraid of anything in this world". It may have beena record riddled with mortality, but it sounded oddly energised by the encounter. By contrast, HTDAAB most definitely has The Fear. Bono has said that he thinks of himself as the atomic bomb of that unwieldy title, that his father's death lit a self-destructive spark that took two years to defuse. And "Vertigo" may be the sound of that immediate tailspin of grief, the butal disorientation of "everything I wish I didn't know".
Before his death, Bono's father apparently struggled with and finally lost his faith. If HTDAAB feels much more intimately urgent than any U2 record of the past decade, it may be that, with their belief so jeopardised, their hopes so throroughly jangled, there's so much more at stake. While in the past they may have hung with Johnny Cash, and even named a record after the experience of Hiroshima, HTDAAB feels like the first U2 record fully acquainted with DOOm, touched by what the American novelist Steve Erickson once called "the nuclear imagination"
(thats the first bit, just give a bit longer to do the rest
)
Right, lets see:
"ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! Bono began Boy, 24 years ago now, counting in the opening bars of "I Will Follow" just so. They sounded drilled and disciplined from the start, marshalling the righteous ire of The Clash with the rigour of Joy Division, like God's own post-punk band....
UNOS! DOS! TRES! CATORCE! So when "Vertigo" wails into life with mangled Spanish, it feels like a timely nod to their garage-band hinterland. "Catorce" rather than the expected "cuatro" because this is, after all, U2's 14th album (including Wide Awake In America and Passengers). It had, by by all accounts, a difficult gestation, a year's work with Chris Thomas, including with a 50-piece orchestra, was shelved. There are actually seven people, including Eno, Flood and Nelle Hooper, credited with "additional production". Having spent a decade reinventing themselves as stadium ironists, the supreme irony may be that sincerity is the trickiest pose of all to maintain. If ATYCLB saw them reapplying for the job of Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band In The World, four years on, they might still be on probation.
In which case recalling Steve Lillywhite, the producer of their debut trilogy of albums, to work with them seems like a back-to-basics statement of intent. But no-one steps into the same garage twice. While the songs on HTDAAB revisit the wide-eyed, claning vistas of October or War, some of that marching certainty has been lost, the compasses are reeling and all the clocks seem swry. Really, the cover of this record could have been an experienced update on the blankly innocent portrait of Boy. The title might simply have been Man.
In retrospect, the key line on ATYCLB was from that affectionate quarrel with Michael Hutchence, "Stuck In A Moment": "I'm not afraid of anything in this world". It may have beena record riddled with mortality, but it sounded oddly energised by the encounter. By contrast, HTDAAB most definitely has The Fear. Bono has said that he thinks of himself as the atomic bomb of that unwieldy title, that his father's death lit a self-destructive spark that took two years to defuse. And "Vertigo" may be the sound of that immediate tailspin of grief, the butal disorientation of "everything I wish I didn't know".
Before his death, Bono's father apparently struggled with and finally lost his faith. If HTDAAB feels much more intimately urgent than any U2 record of the past decade, it may be that, with their belief so jeopardised, their hopes so throroughly jangled, there's so much more at stake. While in the past they may have hung with Johnny Cash, and even named a record after the experience of Hiroshima, HTDAAB feels like the first U2 record fully acquainted with DOOm, touched by what the American novelist Steve Erickson once called "the nuclear imagination"
(thats the first bit, just give a bit longer to do the rest
)
